A dedicated Dungeons and Dragons player has spent the last five years of play tracking all the rolls throughout their lengthy campaign, and has decided to share the numbers with others. These statistics offer a fascinating insight into averages across a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and even address the question of whether a player can truly be lucky in the tabletop game.
The original version of Dungeons and Dragons was released in 1974 and has remained immensely popular for over five decades. Its influence on role-playing games, both in tabletop and video game forms, can not be understated. And while tabletop has been the primary way to enjoy Dungeons and Dragons for a long time, games like Baldur's Gate 3 have played a massive role in introducing the series and its mechanics to non-tabletop players. Dice rolls are central to DnD, with players rolling a 20-sided die to determine the outcome of almost every situation. These rolls are contextual, in that they are determined by what is happening in the game at that time. For example, a player lifting a heavy rock may make a Strength roll, and that roll is affected by the value of their Strength skill. Meanwhile, a character attempting to lie to another might do so with a Deception roll, which would be affected by their Charisma. With so many rolls happening constantly, it's wild that someone has managed to track theirs over five years.
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This is What Five Years of Dungeons and Dragons Rolls Look Like
Over on Reddit, user DeliciousSeason shared the spreadsheet where they kept a rolling record of all the rolls from their homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which they say has been collected over the last five years, though it's unclear exactly how many sessions this covers. They joked that "this has made me pay proper attention to the sessions." In total, there were 6842 rolls. These are pretty heavily weighted toward the characters who were present the most. For example, the Dungeon Master had 2041 of those 6842 rolls (29.83%), and it's only natural that they then would roll the largest number of natural 1s and 20s. In terms of averages, 19 was the number rolled the most on the D20, with 407 total rolls. The number rolled the least was a natural 1, at 301.
It's also interesting to see the type of Dungeons and Dragons Ability Checks that were made throughout their campaign. Constitution checks were made the least, being made just nine times across the five years. Unsurprisingly, Initiative was the most common check, with 545 rolls. It's interesting to see how the players' overall playstyle is reflected in these figures. For example, there were just 15 Sleight of Hand checks. However, there were 322 total Stealth rolls, implying that while the players used a stealthy playstyle, they weren't necessarily using it to pick the pockets of others.
These stats are also an interesting look into whether a Dungeons and Dragons player can ever be truly lucky with their dice rolls. The answer: sort of, but the averages do tend to win out. The average roll result for each character depends heavily on the length of time they spent in the game. While some characters, such as Ubo (12.85) and Fenric (9.76), had a roll average far away from the mean, this was impacted by the fact that they didn't do all that many rolls in the first place (20 for Ubo, 70 for Fenric). Looking at the numbers, all but one of the characters with over 200 total DnD dice rolls in the campaign had an average roll result between 10.63 and 10.98. The exception was Halcyon, a Celestial Sorceress who averaged 11.23 across their 547 rolls. That's a leap of 0.25 above the next highest - the same total range between the rest of the characters with over 200 rolls in this campaign. If anyone can be considered the lucky one here, it's Halcyon.
- Franchise
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Original Release Date
- 1974
- Publisher
- Wizards of the Coast
- Designer
- E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson